Using Ubuntu 10.10, PB 1.0.8.6067. Got this to work w/o too much fuss.

One little glitch I ran into was that the IP address shown for usb0 when you do a "sudo ifconfig" is NOT the correct ip address. Doh. If you go into the PB's Config/About/Network, you'll see in the USB section that the IP address is actually one lower than what is shown in the ifconfig output. I remember reading somewhere that the PB exposes multiple IPs?

Anyway...if you use the IP address shown on the PB screen, you can mount it using whatever method you prefer, and that's all.

I'm getting about 5 MBps (bytes - not bits) for a file copy (a xvid video) from Ubuntu to the playbook using Nautilus. Using wifi I was getting app. 1.5MBps.

Couldn't get it working in virtualbox (WinXP). Installed a driver upon usb detection, but not the correct software, and I tried a bunch of things but got nowhere. Thought it would save me from booting into win7 if I ever want to use the sync/backup functions of the RIM software. If anyone got it going in VB, please let me know.

(you care about "inet addr:169.254.236.138" and this address will change every time you plug in the Playbook)
5. # mkdir -p /mnt/playbook (make a mount point for the playbook, only needs to be done once on your system)
6. # mount -t cifs -o username=playbook,password=PASSWORD,rw //169.254.236.137/media /mnt/playbook
(note that the inet address is one less than inet addr in step 4)
7. # df
//169.254.236.137/media/
61095920 3328768 57767152 6% /mnt/playbook

This is a bash script file similar to what I use to connect my PlayBook to Linux:

#PlayBook_IP=$(ifconfig -a | grep 169.254 | sed 's/.*inet addr:\(169.254[0-9.]*\).*/\1/')
#Need to get from freshly started Device Info from PlayBook
# It is also 1 less than the value found in inet addr:
# For example from ifconfig usb0 and inet addr:169.254.19.62 use:
# 169.254.19.61

Unfortunately USB isn't any faster than WiFi. The Playbook has a slow memory chip.
Both are 5MB/s here.

Eh, I think there is more to it than that. my USB transfers range from 10 to 12 mb/s. Which tops out the peak for USB connections. Something of note... my Windows PC only get's 6-8 but this could also have a lot to do with motherboards chipset.

Just want to revive this thread, in case anyone else is still having this problem. I recently dug out my PlayBook to see if I could revive it and get some use out of it. Although I could connect via WiFi, transferring some larger video files took way too long, so I wanted to connect via USB. Unfortunately following all these instructions in this thread and others did not work for me, both in Fedora and Arch Linux. I finally figured out a way to get it working on Arch Linux. The reason why it didn't work was because the USB network interface was never getting assigned a proper address from the PlayBook. Here's what I did:

Note, as you may know, that IP address will always change whenever you disconnect/reconnect, so it may be different for you. From that network address, we can calculate what address we should be assigned on our network interface on the connecting laptop/desktop, and the network address.

If the PlayBook's IP address is: 169.254.239.121
Then our IP address will be: 169.254.239.122 (add one to the last octet)
The address for the network will be: 169.254.239.120/30 (the PB's IP, minus one from the last octet)

Do the same with whatever IPv4 address you have for your PlayBook and note them down.

Now, from the terminal, I run ip link to show my interfaces. On most Linux distributions you may use ifconfig instead.

Code:

$ ip link

For me, device four is the interface that the PlayBook is connecting to, with id enp0s26f7u3: